


Angel Eyes

by Bellatrix_Wannabe_89



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Angst and Feels, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Jaime Saves The Day
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:40:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23403124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bellatrix_Wannabe_89/pseuds/Bellatrix_Wannabe_89
Summary: A lifetime of abuse and taunts and torment has left Brienne with nothing but shattered self-esteem and a boyfriend who’s continuing the cycle that her step-mother Roelle started. She thinks it’s unavoidable, his mocking cruelty, until a golden haired green eyed angel from her past offers her the escape she needs.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 11
Kudos: 61





	Angel Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> So this was kinda-sorta a prompt from any GC where we collectively, sadly, decided that in a modern world where Brienne didn’t have the ability to swordfight with the way Roelle abused her and all the shitty things she’s gone though with people being mean and horrible about her looks and whatnot, and her absolutely horrible self-esteem, she would be the prime target for being a victim in an abusive relationship which is how this came about. It won’t be super long, but it needed to be written and I hope y’all enjoy.

They started out in love. More than that, they started out happy. 

The two of them met in college, both of them students in the pre-law major and both of them into sports; her the captain of the swim team and him a wide receiver on the football team. 

Freshman Brienne Tarth tutored the C- student Ronnet Connington, who only got into Stormsend University because his father was an alumni, in his senior year. They spent most nights together, and one day when they celebrated him getting a B on one of his tests (an open book final but, at the end of the day, it was still a B) they went out for drinks and they ended up in the back of her car naked and moaning each others name. 

He was handsome, very handsome, with flaming red hair and green eyes and a body built for sin. He was shorter than her by a few inches but he didn’t mind, he just asked her with an apologetic smile not to wear heels when she was with him but she didn’t mind that. Ron was her first real boyfriend after all. If Brienne could make him feel better by not wearing heels when she was around him then she would. He was nice and sweet and caring, he didn’t mind her ugliness or her ocean of freckles or broadness or tallness… He even let her stay in his apartment rather than go back home for winter and spring break so she wouldn’t have to be around her step mother. 

Roelle was an honest woman. Brutally honest. She told Brienne the truth about how mannish she was, how stupid, how ‘freakishly big’ she was, how no man could ever want her, how it was her fault that her father cheated on his wife with girls half his age because he was so unhappy with such an ugly stubborn child.

But her step mother taught her valuable lessons, ones Brienne took to heart. The tall blonde would be lucky if she found ANY man who could stomach her unattractive looks much less a good one like Ron which made her appreciate him all the more. She would be lucky to even graduate high school much less land a spot at one of the best pre-law programs in the country because of how unintelligent she was which made her work extra hard at school (academics always come easy to Brienne but if Roelle said she was slow and her father never said anything in defense then her step mother must have been right). Brienne was a ‘pig-headed stubborn bitch’ in the older woman's own words, and getting a sharp smack with a hairbrush or a hard slap across the face or a painful leather belt on her backside taught her to never really talk back to others. 

She was ugly. She knew the truth; Roelle and the kids at school and even total strangers made sure she knew the truth. But not Ron. Ron said she was pretty when she covered up her sea of freckles with makeup, he said she had a nice smile when she didn’t grin too big and show the world her crooked teeth, he called her posh voice sexy when she wasn’t laughing that obnoxiously loud laugh of hers. 

He was nice to her. Which was why near the end of his senior year he told her she would need to drop out and go to Last Hearth, some tiny little no-name college, with him, the only place he got accepted into law school.

“I don’t have any scholarships, I didn’t get approved for enough loans… you need to move with me and work while I go to school so I can afford this,” Ron begged. 

Brienne gnawed at her lip. She had made the Dean's List, she was in the top 1% of her class, and already her professors were talking about how they had connections at Citadel, the top university in the country, when the time came for her to apply to law school. 

“I’ll be done in four years. Then it’ll be your turn to go back while I work as a lawyer,” he argued. “It’s the perfect plan.”

“I-... I don’t know. I’m doing really well here in Stormsend...”

“Brienne, please. I won’t be able to do this any other way.” His handsome green eyes hardened. “Do you want to see me fail? Is that it?”

“Of course not!” she had cried, “I really want you to make it I just… can’t I go to school and work then give you the money? I got a full ride here, all my money I could send to you up north.”

It was the wrong thing to say. She could tell by the look in Rons eye.

“Law school is expensive,” he said crossly, using the same tone Roelle used when Brienne asked a stupid question or made a dumb comment. “Okay you wanted to prove you’re better than everyone and take a double major, you won’t have time to work AND go to school.”

“I… I know but-.”

“But what? Okay you take a four year break, then go back to school and it’ll be my turn to support you. I don’t know why this is so difficult for you to get.” He smiled at her then, all sweet softness that made her melt. He reached up and buried his hand in her short blonde hair. “Plus we can start our life together. We can get a little apartment, you can help me study... it’ll be great.”

Which was how, three months later, Brienne found herself waiting tables and doing 18 hour shifts so Ron could afford to go to school. She worked herself to the bone then came home and helped him with his schoolwork. Sometimes he got mad when she would correct him too much. He would snap at her, bark at her, tell her she wasn’t explaining things clear enough or he knew what he was doing and didn’t need a college dropouts opinion on his essay. But he was under a lot of stress and Brienne wasn’t helping things by upsetting him or adding onto the pile, it was mostly her fault when he got mad at her.

Roelle used to tell Brienne that she spoke too freely about things she didn’t know that much about so clearly that was the case here too.

Brienne eventually got a job at a tiny little bankruptcy law firm working as a secretary. It was a far cry from her dream job of being a Kingslanding DA working to put away dangerous criminals who hurt the most vulnerable in society, but, she told herself every day as she poured over credit card statements, this would just be another thing she could add to her resume when she applied for law school.

But those applications never went out. Because when Ron finally graduated he did so with no honors, no job offers, and massively in debt considering he hadn’t gotten any scholarships and had to rely solely on loans and Brienne's meager paychecks. 

“It’s just not a good time for you to go back to school,” he told her one night when she brought up the idea of going back to Stormsend. “We’re almost a hundred thousand in debt… Let us get settled first, lower some of the debt and then next year you can go back.”

Brienne argued with him. She already gave up four years of her life working shit jobs supporting him, she reminded him, it was her turn, he promised her she could go back if she did this for him. Ron argued she dropped out of her own choice and if she had worked a little bit harder they could have made a little bit more of a dent in his debt and maybe she could have gone back to school. 

Roelle always told her she was a lazy child. Brienne never really believed that but if Ron thought so as well… Plus, yes, there were some weeks when she worked at the diner when she could have gone three double shifts in a row rather than just two, and maybe she could have made more of an effort in her appearance when she went to work at the law firm (Ron always told her prettier people got ahead further but Brienne had no idea how to do proper makeup and her hair was too lank and dry and short to do much with.) 

In the end they both agreed he was in the right, and she agreed for one more year before she went back. She got him a job at the same firm she worked at but that lasted a short two and a half months before the partner fired him for missing a huge filing deadline for not one but two clients. 

Ron yelled at Brienne that night. Bad. She was the secretary, she was the one who was supposed to keep up with his schedules, she was the one who was supposed to keep him reminded. He was the lawyer, he did REAL work, he didn’t have time to do both of their jobs (and how hard could her job be if a dropout could get hired for it?) It didn’t matter that Brienne HAD reminded him about the deadlines. Several times. But he always snapped that he knew what he had to do and to stop pestering him so much so she left him alone which was apparently the wrong thing to do.

He was out of work for a time with only Brienne's paycheck to keep them afloat and eventually he found a job working as an estate lawyer. Less than a month later though he came home, threw his briefcase in the corner and barked at Brienne to leave him alone. That night she found out he had been fired from that office as well. Ron claimed the junior partner Lyanna, ‘the sexist bitch’, hated men and hated the fact that he was smarter than her. But in the very small law community of Umber word soon spread that he had been ‘inappropriate’ with the young lawyer and that’s what cost him the job, along with any chance of getting another job in the northern town. 

“Maybe we could move back to Stormsend,” Brienne suggested one night after hearing him complain about not being able to find a job within a hundred leagues of Umber. “I could go back to school, you could find work in the city…”

“We can’t afford that, Brienne!” he shouted at her. “If we move back to the city the rent will be too much for just one of us to be working!”

“I could go to school and work,” she said. “I’ll only do a single major so I won’t be in class as much.”

“You’re too bloody stupid to work enough to help out and go to school,” he grumbled before he drained the last of his beer, tossed it in the trash and stomped off to bed.

It had been nothing more than what Roelle told her for years. It hadn’t mattered that Brienne got a full ride while Ron meanwhile got in because of a desperate phone call his dad had made after getting rejected from every school he applied to. Her step mother called her stupid, her father was too busy with his other girlfriends to care or notice, and now Ron, the only man willing to put up with her ugliness and slowness, called her that too. It had to have been true, at least a little.

After another month of him not being able to find a job, the two of them moved to Bitterbridge where Brienne's best friend from high school Renly Baratheon offered her and Ron a position at his firm; him as a lawyer and her as a receptionist, as a favor to the tall blonde and the first person he came out to. He was a tax attorney which meant a lot of money but you had to be on top of your game at all times and know your shit.

Ron did neither.

Brienne, who aced the tax course she took, offered to help when she saw him struggling but he would snap and tell her that he knew better then a secretary who never even finished college. Not just at home, but at work too. She would blush when she realized everyone was staring and quietly urged him to lower his voice but that just enraged him further.

Renly came out of his office and ordered him to keep his voice down he obeyed, for the moment, but when they got home Ron shouted and yelled that Brienne embarrassed him in front of their boss, that everyone saw him getting chastised and how it was all her fault he wasn’t getting the proper respect. If she made an effort to make herself ‘even a little bit attractive’ people wouldn’t snicker and sneer at him; poor Ron, he said his co-workers would say, stuck with an ugly idiot of a girlfriend who loved to embarrass him and pretend she knew better than him.

Whenever her father asked Roelle to go shopping with Brienne, she would snap at the young girl how ugly and mannish she was in the stores. It was embarrassing, Roelle told her, when Brienne searched through dress racks and expected to find one that didn’t make her look like a nightmare, to force the store clerks to lie when she asked if something might look good on her which was how she ended up in the same plain boxy T-shirts, hoodies and jeans year after year, clothes she knew fit even if they were unshapely.

She embarrassed her step mother and here she was years later embarrassing her boyfriend. So Brienne apologized and promised she wouldn’t correct him in the office anymore.

Turns out she didn’t need to keep her promise for long. After Ron lost a client because of how bad he screwed up Renly told the red head he needed to take some refresher courses at the local college on tax law. The firm would pay for it, but it was becoming more and more evident he didn’t know what he was doing and, as much as Renly hated doing this because of his friendship with Brienne, he wouldn’t let Ron drive the reputation of ‘Tyrell & Baratheon’ into the ground. 

Ron called him a queer, told him he didn’t need a refresher in anything, grabbed his briefcase and stormed out. That night Brienne came home fuming not at the fact he lost ANOTHER job not even four months in, but at the insult he called Renly. She lost her temper, calling him a lazy hack who insulted the only man that was willing to give him a chance and demanded to know what he planned to do now that his resume was littered with so many short stints that no other firm would take him seriously. He got mad. Really mad. Ron screamed at her that she never supported him and forced him to work in a area of law he didn’t have a lot of experience in, that she never was willing to help him, he called her ugly, a freak, a stupid dropout who needed him far more than he needed her. When Brienne yelled at him to calm down, he ordered her to shut up before he raised his hand.

Brienne stood up from her chair then, and stared down the man who stood several inches smaller than her, hands clenched. She may have been stupid, she may have been an embarrassment, she may have been an ugly freak that he had to fuck from behind to get it up, but she would be damned if she suffered a single slap from him.

The sheer height and massive build that he seemed to have forgotten she possessed gave him pause and she used the moment to storm out. She went to a hotel and as she stared up at the ceiling that night as she laid in the bed her mind whirled.

Yes he insulted Renly but that didn’t mean Brienne had a right to go after him. Ron wasn’t lazy, and it wasn’t really his fault he couldn’t hold down a job. It was hard work being a lawyer and she should support him and lift him up; not give him grief because he lost another job, especially not one where she pushed him to take because they were desperate for money. 

The next morning she went back home where Ron greeted her with a soft smile and a softer hand. He even apologized for raising his hand to her. Brienne apologized in turn for telling him and accepted the promise that he wouldn’t ever threaten her again, it’s just that last night made him so mad, Brienne KNEW he wasn’t good at tax law, she KNEW how hard this would be but she went ahead and pushed for him to take the job anyway just because Renly was an old friend of hers. If she worked a little harder, maybe they wouldn’t have been that hard up for cash that they needed to take a job he didn’t want.

Brienne apologized for that, promising she wouldn’t push him towards anything else he didn’t want to do again. They hugged, kissed, had sex and as they laid there in bed afterwards, Brienne asked him if it might be possible for her to go back to Stormsend but Ron made the solid point that she would be over 30 when she finally graduated law school and at that point was it really worth going back?

After she managed to bite back her tears when she realized he made a point, they sat and talked about what their next move was. Ron suggested moving to the capital and opening his own firm. When Brienne mentioned Kingslanding was the most expensive city in Westeros, Ron snapped, telling her that once they realized how ingenious he was and how good he was when given a chance money would be no issue. 

So they packed up their tiny little apartment for the third time in two years and drove to the large city of Kingslanding. Brienne and Ron got a tiny little apartment above a Dornish takeout place in Fleabottom and then a month of looking they finally managed to lease office space, a tiny receptionist area and then a smaller private office in back. The paint was peeling, the carpet was moldy, half the outlets didn’t work but it was the cheapest option and Ron wouldn’t hear about working outside of the law field for a year to be able to afford a better space.

“I went to school for eight years,” he reminded her sharply. “I’m not going to lower myself and flip burgers or file papers.”

But eventually their savings depleted trying to fix up the office space as well as paying rent and utilities on their apartment and he was forced to look for another job to try to pay for his own firm. But his ghosts followed him in Kingslanding, the assault in Last Hearth, the abysmal performance in Bitterbridge, the fact he managed to graduate law school only by the skin of his teeth, a handful of lackluster references… Brienne worked on finding her own job as well except she got quite a few interviews easily, a fact that greatly annoyed Ron. 

“You’re a dropout, how the hell are you getting so many damn interviews?” he would bark when she marked another time in her calendar. “It’s bullshit!”

Brienne would apologize and promised him that it wasn’t his fault no one would give him so much as a call and clearly it was just a fluke that she kept getting interviews. It wasn’t the fact she had a solid job record since she was fifteen and all of her employers had nothing but glowing accommodations to shower her with because she worked harder than most.

It was all just a fluke. 

The first interview she went to was a criminal defense office. It was an upscale firm smack dab in the middle of Red Keep, the wealthiest part of the city, called Lyons & Blackwater and she would be interviewing to be the personal secretary for one of the partners, a Mr. James Lyons. She took an elevator up to the top floor where a petite pretty girl who introduced herself as Pia in a large outer office smiled and told her that Mr. Lyons would see her now. Brienne thanked her and, with a deep breath, headed into the office with her head held high and a friendly smile on her plump lips. The man in the office looked up when the y’all blonde walked in, and whatever smile she wore fell hard. The lawyer's green eyes went wide, and his jaw dropped to the large cluttered desk as he and Brienne stared at one another unmoving, unblinking, not breathing… A thousand amazing memories of laughs and talks and kisses from a lifetime ago flooded her mind until, finally, the man breathed a single word.

“Wench…”

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